The Literacy Blog

Lightman fails to dispel gloom

2012-01-27T11:06:00.000Z

The BBC has just broken the news that ‘just one in 15 (6.5%) pupils starting secondary school in England “behind” for their age goes on to get five good GCSEs including English and maths’. Moreover, only 34% of children classified as disadvantaged (children entitled to free school dinners or in care) reached the government benchmark.

The new data also indicate that 95% of pupils reaching Level 5 in their SATs at the end of Key Stage 2 (Year 6) go on to achieve five good GCSEs, while only 45.6% of children getting Level 4 went on to get five good GCSEs.

This is exactly what Sounds-Write has been arguing to be the case since we started training teachers in 2003. Many secondary SENCos and special needs staff have reported to us the enormous numbers of children entering secondary school with reading ages far behind their chronological ages, notwithstanding their ‘good’ SATs results.

What Sounds-Write does is to train the staff in these schools to catch up some of the neediest, though this is hugely difficult when there are so many children requiring help. What these heroic teachers also have to contend with is the unwillingness of head teachers and line managers to allow them the time needed to do their jobs thoroughly. Half an hour twice a week has never been enough time to ‘catch up’ a child who is already as many as five or six years behind in their reading and spelling. Some special needs teachers are even expected to sit next to pupils during their timetabled class lessons and remediate whatever problems they have!

On its website, the BBC carries an interview with Brian Lightman, the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. All I can say is that Mr Lightman did little to illuminate the discussion by whining about the ‘difficulties’ and by claiming that every school he knows ‘is doing everything it can to help disadvantaged children’.

Equally breathtaking was Shadow Education Secretary Stephen Twigg’s accusation that, while he acknowledged disadvantaged pupils were not reaching their potential, the government is promoting ‘pet projects over real need’. Has he somehow forgotten that the systematic failure we are now looking at results directly from the last government not getting to grips with the extent of the problem?

The truth is that parents are sick of the kinds of excuses offered by union leaders such as Lightman, and what really took the biscuit yesterday was his suggestion that ‘parents should go in to help and actually make sure when they’re choosing a school that the school will actually be suited to the needs of their individual child ’. Fat chance of that if your child is allocated to one of the 909 in which ‘not one low-attaining pupil (those not reaching Level 4 at the end of primary school) reached this level’.

No wonder the demand for change is so insistent. The time has come for serious reform and that can only happen when all concerned look squarely at the evidence showing what works and what does not.

Take-up of match funding

2012-01-22T18:33:00.000Z

Since the government launched its scheme to encourage schools to train teaching staffs in how to teach phonics, only 1,000 primaries have booked such training.

Graeme Paton, writing in the Telegraph, reported last week that in many areas of the country in which pupils are failing to reach the national average in reading, schools are simply ignoring the opportunity to take up the government’s offer of matched funding. As the scheme suggests the arrangement matches pound for pound up to a maximum of £3,000 the money any school with a Key Stage 1 component spends on phonics training.

This is an important moment for education in this country because it is abundantly clear that Michael Gove and Nick Gibb are resolutely determined to drive through reform of the education system.

With the newly announced Y1 phonics screening check about to be introduced across all schools in England in June, there will be no hiding place for those schools ignoring advice on the teaching of phonics.

Mumsnet postings and an offer not honoured

2012-01-19T11:27:00.000Z

For anyone interested, I posted a couple of replies to questions on Mumsnet this morning. You can read them (and the rest of the thread) here and here.

The other thing that’s on my mind is that I have recently offered two local primary school the opportunity to train one member of their Key Stage 1 teams entirely free of charge. This is partly because I would genuinely like to contribute something to my local community and, of course, partly because I hoped that, if they did agree to send someone, they would be so blown away by the efficacy of the Sounds-Write programme, they’d be banging on the door within six months begging to train more.

So, what was the response? In the case of one of the schools, the head teacher, who said he’d look at the website and, presumably, see that Sounds-Write has been accepted for match funding, as well as being scrutinised by the DfE, never even bothered to reply. In the case of the other school, after an initial reply – a couple of days after the course began – on a second prompting, replied that the school was ‘ok’. This, I hasten to add, is a school attended by two children I have been teaching to read and spell and who clearly have not been getting clear instruction.

Again, in both cases, I also offered to go in and talk them and/or their respective staffs about Sounds-Write and to explain how the programme works and the kinds of results one might expect if they were to implement the programme. In neither case was there any response.

I shall be very interested to see what kinds of results are produced by both schools after the DfE’s new phonics screening check in June. We’ll see then whether or not they are justified in having confidence in what they are doing.

Sue Palmer - too much, too often

2012-01-15T12:29:00.001Z

I can’t help thinking that Sue Palmer, the literacy consultant and author of Toxic Childhood, doth protest too much, too often. This time she’s complaining about the government’s new EYFS writing targets.

Just to be sure what we’re talking about, the target in reading is for children ‘to read and understand simple sentences. They use phonic knowledge to decode regular words and read them aloud accurately. They also read some common irregular words. They demonstrate understanding when talking with others about what they have read’.

The target for writing is for children ‘to use their phonic knowledge to write words in ways which match their spoken sounds. They also write some irregular common words. They write simple sentences which can be read by themselves and others. Some words are spelt correctly and others are phonetically plausible’.

For Sue Palmer, getting children ‘manipulating pencils across paper when they’re scarcely out of nappies’ is ‘cruel’. If there is any manipulation going on, it lies in the rhetoric Palmer deploys to talk about questions of teaching reading and writing.

She is quoted as saying that the above targets are ‘unrealistic’ because 'for boys especially the hand-eye co-ordination and small-scale motor control involved in writing can take years to develop’.

While it is certainly true that a small number of children in YR in particular will need practice in developing further fine-motor control skills, there are plenty of activities which can be used in the classroom to link spellings to sounds. Writing in the air, writing in sand, writing with tools for a suitable size for the hands of small children, art work, and so on, are all activities which can be pursued in the first years of school.

The reason, she claims, for delaying the teaching of writing is that ‘many children from less advantaged homes’ need to develop their spoken language. Again, this is perfectly true, but these children are in a minority in the vast majority of schools across the country. By the age of four to five years, most children know three-quarters of the grammar of the language and have vocabularies of four to five thousand words, far in excess of anything they will be expected to read or write in the early years. In any event, ensuring that children from disadvantaged backgrounds are made literate from an early age will give them the best chance they have of catching up.

Another argument put forward by Palmer is that teaching children to write too early can put them off. Well, it can if the expectation is that the child will write words and sentences containing all the complexities of the English alphabet code. However, this is NOT the case. According to the government’s guidelines, children are expected to write ‘simple’ sentences, the implication being that the sentences are commensurate with where they are in their phonics programmes. This means being able to write sentences like ‘The pig sat in wet mud’, or, perhaps at a slightly later stage, ‘The twin frogs must swim in the pond’.

None of the above precludes any of the activities Sue Palmer would like to see happening in early years classrooms, such as the reading of stories, singing, teaching children how to co-operate with one another, how to eat at table and all the other lovely things good teachers want for their charges.

Just about everything Palmer objects to flies in the face of the research and nowhere is this revealed more clearly than in her assertion that, in her visits to Dutch and Scandinavian schools, she didn’t see children ‘being forced to do something beyond their developmental level’. Apart from the ideologically loaded ‘forced’, the developmentalist approach of which she is so enamoured would leave most of our children in kindergarten until they are eight.

The best kind of teaching, Sue, is aimed not at the ripe functions of the child but at the ripening functions. In this way, it is learning that drives development, but only when the instruction has been organised properly.

Thanks to Susan Godsland for bringing the article in Nursery World to my attention.

Jabberwoty

2012-01-08T07:05:00.000Z

It’s the time of the year once again for the WOTY! What’s this, you wonder? WOTY is the Word of the Year, each year decided on by the AmericanDialect Society. At the annual conference in Portland, Oregon, Ben Zimmer* is chairing the New Words Committee, which decides on the WOTY.

This year’s nominations (from Zimmer’s VisualThesaurus) are the usual mix of the spellbindingly creative to the unambiguously abhorrent. Some of the words are off the cultural register for many, shall we say, older people in the UK. For example, I had no idea what a ‘kardash’ might be but my youngest daughter worked it out straight away. Apparently, Kim Kardashian’s marriage to Kris Humphries lasted only seventy-two days and a ‘kardash’ is now a short-lived union of two people in matrimony.

Some of the words have already passed their sell-by date: utter the words ‘Arab Spring’, ‘cloud’, ‘tablet’ and ‘occupy’ and it’s difficult not to stifle a yawn.

However, uncomfortable it feels in the mouth, ‘humblebrag’ – according to Zimmer, ‘an expression of false humility, especially by celebrities on Twitter’ – seems particularly apposite at the moment. ‘Tiger mother/Tiger mom’ may also gain in popularity as parents raise their expectations for their children’s academic performance.

My favourite word of the moment – a year’s a long time in neologisms – ‘bazinga’! OK, so you don’t watch ‘The Big Bang Theory’, to which I am fast becoming addicted, but if it’s getting my daughter to think that it’s cool to do physics, it’s fine by me.

For all my yawning, ‘occupy’ is the WOTY!

Thanks to Mr Verb for giving me the heads-up from the conference.

*Ben Zimmer, now working for the Boston Globe, is the former ‘On Language’ columnist for The New York Times. He also contributes to the weblog ‘Language Log’.

Reading Harry Potter by 11

2012-01-07T11:15:00.000Z

Graeme Paton in yesterday’s Telegraph has headlined Nick Gibb’s latest attempts to raise standards in reading by reporting him as saying that ‘all children should read Harry Potter by 11’.

At first blush, it sounds nauseatingly off-putting. Another prescriptive injunction delivered in a tweetable sound-bite by a government minister! Actually, as you read on, you find that Harry Potter is only one among many suggested, worthy contenders for the literary attentions of children, Roald Dahl, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson being among the others mentioned.

According to Nick Gibb, as many as a half of teenagers are not reading such books because they haven’t learnt to read properly. He cites evidence from a study done by the OECD, which shows England as dropping from seventh to fifteenth position in an international league table. How helpful the comparison with other countries is has been challenged because the variables are so numerous. One immediately obvious variable would be the fact that the English writing system is considerably less transparent than, say, the Finnish or the Spanish or Italian writing systems, making English harder to master.

More worryingly, the study reports that almost forty percent of people in their teens do not read for pleasure. In the past, many reasons for this have been put forward, but the most plausible for me has always been that if a child finds reading difficult, it’s unlikely that they will spend their leisure time doing it. Studies in the United States have suggested that unless a child’s reading age is two years above their chronological age, they won’t read for pleasure. If you think about it, it makes sense. Does a child that isn’t good at sport throw themselves into opportunities to take part in sporting activities? Unlikely!

If we want children to read and read widely, we need to make sure they can decode by the end of Key Stage 1. The fact that the writing system is more difficult to learn than many others doesn’t mean it can’t be taught. It simply takes longer and it requires that teachers are properly trained to teach it.

Where Nick Gibb hits the mark is in his insistence that all primary schools teach children how to read (and spell, I would argue) through the medium of phonics. He is also right to say that once children can read they need to be practising all the time on the books already commended.

This is why he is introducing the new phonics reading check – to pinpoint children who, by the end of Y1, are already falling behind. With only a third of children passing the pilot test last summer, it isn’t so much a question of children falling behind as a question of the professional expertise of the teachers teaching them. This isn’t a diatribe against teachers but it is a warning to Nick Gibb. It isn’t enough to exhort teachers and parents to encourage children to become voracious readers. You need first to ensure that they are taught to read - which is why the match funding being offered by government should have been earmarked exclusively for the training of teachers.

In education it is very hard indeed to decide what the priorities are and to remain single minded in one's pursuit of them.

Apart from the match-funding issue, Nick Gibb has made a good start. He mustn't lose sight of the fact that the priority lies in the training of the teachers!

The Written World

2012-01-02T13:22:00.001Z

This morning on Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg began the first in the series ‘The Written World’. He starts by saying what I always begin every Sounds-Write training with: that writing is ‘the most important idea that anyone has ever had’. Bragg then goes on to talk about the development of writing systems.

What he doesn’t do as explicitly as I’d have liked is to draw the connection between language and writing. As Peter Daniels (1996) says:

‘Humankind is defined by language; but civilization is defined by writing. Writing made historical records possible, and writing was the basis for the urban societies of the Old World. All humans speak; only humans in civilizations write, so speech is primary, and writing is secondary.’ [My emphasis]

And it is this connection that is so important in the training of teachers of reading and writing to young children: teachers need to understand that while everyone learns to speak naturally, writing is, to use the words of Steven Pinker, ‘a bolt-on extra’. It needs to be taught explicitly and systematically.The Greeks introduced spellings for the vowel sounds into what had previously been a consonantal spelling system; thus, every sound in every word was represented by a discrete symbol and we now had a fully phonetic alphabetic script. And to underline a point Diane McGuinness (2004) never tires of making: for writers and readers of alphabetic languages, the sounds of the language are the basis for the written code; the spellings are the code. The acquisition of the written language is essential therefore to learning to read.

In spite of this lack of emphasis Bragg’s series is very interesting, and, in this first programme, he traces the development of written language throughout relatively recent history. As he establishes from the outset, the crucible for the invention and development of writing over five thousand years ago was the somewhat prosaic and mundane need to keep accounts. With the growth of the first cities around the Middle East in areas like Mesopotamia and Sumeria, some kind of system was required for recording the ever multiplying number of financial transactions. From a functional perspective, writing assisted greatly in ‘the administration of government institutions’.

Since that time, the roles of written language have increased enormously. Nevertheless, in all this time, one thing hasn't changed: now as then, learning to read is one of if not the most important tasks children must accomplish. In the programme, Richard Parkinson, assistant keeper of ancient pharaohnic culture at the British Museum, draws a distinction between the ‘dreadful life‘ of the humble farm labourer in ancient Egypt and that of the educated scribe: if you were able to read and write, even then you could ‘become your own boss’.

All of which brings me back to thinking just how crucially important it is for children to learn how to read and write: everything they do subsequently in school and in life depends so much on this skill, without which no-one can develop their full potential.

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year

2011-12-25T19:39:00.000Z

With thanks to LW-B

Linguistic versus synthetic phonics

2011-12-17T18:35:00.000Z

Someone on the Reading Reform Foundation website recently asked what were the differences between linguistic and synthetic phonics. Although some people claim that the differences between linguistic phonics and synthetic phonics are minimal, I would contend that they are enormous and, furthermore, that these differences have profound consequences for teaching and learning.

To begin with, the emphasis in linguistic phonics is teaching learners that the sounds in speech are represented by print, a symbolic system of spellings. The great advantage of teaching from sound to print lies in several factors:

First, the sounds of the language are acquired/learned without any specific teaching: wherever you go in the world, children learn to talk, despite the different views and approaches to encouraging them to talk, such as for example, the use of ‘child directed speech’ (CDS or ‘motherese’ – ugh – as some people call it) people in this country tend to use.

Second, the sounds of the language are finite: there are in English, depending on accent, only (!) forty-four or so. Neither do the sounds of the language change (at least not in the short term): i.e. we don’t add a new sound every now and then or decide to drop one.

Third, the sounds of the language provide the basis for the code (‘The Study of Writing Systems’ – Daniels, P.). All alphabetic writing systems are written to match the sounds: the sounds drive the code; the spellings are the code (to paraphrase McGuinness). In other words, the sounds are what the written language was invented/borrowed (from Latin) for.

Fourth, although forty-four sounds are rather more than, say, Spanish or Italian, if you ground your teaching in the sounds of the language, you simply can’t ever go wrong. And here I’m not saying people don’t make mistakes: there’s no such thing as a perfect speller in English because, if you’ve never seen a particularly complex (in terms of sound/spelling correspondences) before, how would you know how to spell it? Nevertheless, if you are taught how to segment sounds in words and you give a plausible representation of each of those sounds, you end up with something everyone can read and make sense of in the context of text, even if the spelling isn’t orthographically correct.

Fifth, teaching children that the sounds in our speech are represented by the squiggles on the page we call spellings makes, according to Diane McGuinness, perfect psychological sense to them. This is why, in Sounds-Write trainings, we counsel strongly against using imprecise language like letters ‘making’ sounds, because if letters make sounds, then many children have no idea how the writing system works. They think that the sounds are completely random and don’t realise that they are connected to the sounds in their own speech. They don’t know where all these sounds come from and, if they are taught in the way many children are taught, this erroneous idea is further reinforced by the fact that our spelling system is complex. So, the spelling a can be ‘a’ in ‘mat’, ‘ae’ in ‘baby’, ‘or’ in ‘ball’, etc, etc. This would seem to give the appearance that the single-letter spelling a can be anything and, further, that if it can, there’s no point in trying to learn to read because there’s no discernible logic.

Sixth, if you teach from sound to print, you also avoid all the nonsense of ‘hard’ sounds and ‘soft’ sounds, kicking ‘k’ and curly ‘k’, ‘long’ sounds and ‘short’ sounds, and ‘silent letters’, all of which might be a shared code within the teaching community but they serve to confuse many young children.

Finally, if you teach from sound to print, pupils are presented with systemic, domain-relevant knowledge that is organized and structured, and knowledge that is organised and structured can be chunked into recognisable patterns that are much easier to learn.

Teaching from sound to print leaves you with a very simple (from a logical point of view) system: there are sounds and there are spellings, spellings and sounds – simple language that can be understood by anyone, including parents. Admittedly, spelling is more difficult than reading for all the reasons given by Diane McGuinness but complex spelling is always going to be more problematical for the reasons I’ve already stated. However, ultimately and to paraphrase the late Richard Rorty, this is a contest between an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a new vocabulary which promises great things.

For more information on what a linguistic phonics programme does and doesn't teach, see also Susan Godsland's excellent website.

Farewell to the Hitch

2011-12-16T09:20:00.000Z

In memory of Christopher Eric Hitchens, 1949-2011, writer and permanent oppositionist.

Policy in place, practice not undertaken!

2011-12-16T09:03:00.000Z

Reflections on the statement by the DfE that only 27% of schools use phonics systematically:
Peter Crome, professor of geriatric medicine at Keele University and chair of the National Audit of Dementia, was talking on Radio 4 this morning about the Audit’s findings.

As I listened, I heard him say that the ‘policies were in place, but the practice was not undertaken’. Exactly the same situation is mirrored in the government’s attempts to promote phonics in schools: the policies are there, but the practice is not being undertaken!

That Y1 phonics screening test again

2011-12-14T16:55:00.002Z

Following on from my previous posting, although the Y1 phonics screening test should literally be ‘child’s play’ for pupils taught using a good quality phonics programme, it looks very much as if it won’t be much fun for the 73% of schools not teaching phonics well.

For them, the check is going to come as an unpleasant shock. Out of forty words on the test, twenty are pseudo or nonsense words – something Sounds-Write has been using since we started in 2003. A further ’40-60%’ of the remaining ‘real’ words will be ‘less common words’. The latter are defined by the DfE as words that pupils ‘are unlikely to have read previously’. This means that approximately 75% of the words will be pseudo words or words ‘pupils are unlikely to have read previously’.

It doesn’t take a genius then to realise that some schools aren’t going to be making a good showing and, given that the test will also include words with more complex structures, as well as a range of vowel and consonant digraphs and trigraphs(two-letter spellings and three-letter spellings), time is running short.

By the way, in case you weren’t aware, Sounds-Write teaches everything covered by the screening test and more. We also offer some advice to those schools looking for a phonics programme that will fit the bill.

New Y1 phonics screening check - child's play!

2011-12-12T09:55:00.005Z

At the end of last week the Standards and Testing agency of the DfE sent out to schools its ‘Y1 phonics screening check’, and I have to say that it is great news for Sounds-Write.

It is proposed that the test will consist in a sample list of forty words. The structure will be as follows:

Section 1 Section 2

Page 1: Four pseudo words Page 6: Four pseudo words

Page 2: Four pseudo words Page 7: Four pseudo words

Page 3: Four pseudo words Page 8: Four real words

Page 4: Four real words Page 9: Four real words

Page 5: Four real words Page 10: Four real words.

In Section one, the structure of the words tested will include CVC, VCC, CCVC and CVCC. It will comprise the following sound-spelling correspondences:

a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n. o, p, q(u), r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, plus some consonant two-letters spellings, such as, ch, ck, ff, ll, ng, sh, ss, th and zz; as well as what it describes as ‘consistent vowel digraphs’ or two letter spellings in common parlance: for example, ar, ee, oi oo and or.

In Section two, the structure of the words tested is made a a little more difficult and will include CCVCC, CCCVC, and CCCVCC, and some two-syllable words. It will also add ‘some additional consonant digraphs’, such as ph and wh and more vowel digraphs, for which it gives the following examples: a-e, ai, au, aw, ay, ea, e-e, er, ew, i-e, ie, ir, oa, o-e, ou, ow, oy, ue, u-e, ur, and some three-letter spellings, such as air and igh.

Why is this music to the ears of any teacher teaching Sounds-Write? Because, by the Easter of YR, the children will have been taught formally all of the single letter spelling and all of the two-letter consonant spellings. In addition, even by Easter of YR, they will have practised blending, segmenting and phoneme manipulation in words with more complex consonant clusters, such as CCVCC/CCCVC/CCCVCC words.

What’s more, Sounds-Write-taught children will, from Christmas onwards, be working with nonsense (pseudo) words and coping with them with such facility as to make the test child's play.

By the end of Y1, all of the rest of what is comprised in the test and much more will have been covered, the 'much more' being the rigour with which Sounds-Write teaches the skills and an explicit understanding of how the writing system works in relation to the sounds of the language.

So, Sounds-Write’s response to the test: bring it on!

Two-thirds of children fail new reading test

2011-12-09T16:25:00.001Z

We might at last be about to gain some real insight into how well children in England’s primary schools are being taught to read. It seems that in a trial run of the new reading test, in which some 8,963 children from 300 schools took part, and which is about to be rolled out at the end of this academic year to all Y1 pupils, only 32% passed.
According to Nursery World, only a quarter of the schools taking part in the trial are actually teaching systematic synthetic phonics. The rest are continuing to use the mixed methods approach that has been so discredited by the research.

Personally, I find it truly shocking that such a small proportion of schools are teaching systematic synthetic phonics when the last government was claiming that this is what all schools had been doing since the Jim Rose issued his report. Apparently, BBCNews is quoting the Department for Education as saying that only 27% of schools use phonics systematically.

These results are totally out of kilter with the results of the national curriculum tests, which show eight out of ten children meeting the levels expected of them at the ends of Key Stages 1 and 2. However, they tally almost exactly with the anecdotal evidence we get from SENCos of secondary schools who, after screening their Year 7 intakes to determine which pupils are going to need extra support in their reading, tell us that as many as seventy-five percent have a reading age below their chronological age. It also gives us an insight into why so many young people are leaving schools without the literacy skills required for the world of work or for higher education.

Nick Gibb is today reported as saying that:
‘We need to face up to the uncomfortable truth that, despite the hard work of teachers, not enough of our children are able to read to a high enough standard. We have to take account of our place internationally and listen to business leaders concerned about many school leavers’ literacy. The Government can no longer simply congratulate itself on the proportion of pupils reaching the expected level.’
He’s right of course but the sad truth is that the government has not made its match-funding initiative a priority for training teachers.

If Michael Gove and Nick Gibb don’t change tack and give precedence to the training of teachers, we will continue to see the same kinds of results. When I visited Nick Gibb two years ago before he became a government minister, the advice Sounds-Write gave him was that he needed not only a reading test but a spelling test. Children’s writing (spelling) tells us much more about their understanding of how the writing system works and how it is used than tests of reading alone, valuable though they are.

Sadly, this latest news has attracted the usual adverse criticism. When it comes to teaching children how to read and spell, the leaders of the major unions can always be relied upon to make the usual rebarbatively ignorant comments, Russell Hobby, of the NAHT, and Christine Blower being amongst the latest. On the Reading Reform Foundation forum it was recently reported that Greg Wallace, head teacher at Woodberry Down school in Hackney and a champion of synthetic phonics, had appeared on a television programme with Christine Blower, the leader of the NUT, after which Blower had admitted never having seen synthetic phonics being taught in the classroom. As it says on the RRF, surely a case of the ideology being more important than the reality!

A tale of two cities

2011-12-06T16:44:00.007Z

Morrisons announced this week that it had had to send back three-quarters of its new recruits from Salford for remedial training before they were ready to start working for the company.

Out of two hundred and ten staff recruited, a hundred and fifty had to be sent for ‘remedial training including refresher course in literacy and numeracy’.

The Telegraph quoted Norman Pickavance, the human resources director of Morrisons, as saying that "Many of the people were just not job ready. They lacked a lot of confidence and social skills. It is quite clear the education system has failed them."

Here’s a story that might give Michael Gove and Nick Gibb pause for thought. On October 13^th the New York Times ran a story on Moulshri Mohan, an Indian student from New Delhi, who had received multiple acceptances from universities in the States. She had applied to the US because even though she had a cumulative score of 93.5 percent in her final high school examinations from a private school in India, she couldn’t get into Delhi University! Eventually, she was enrolled at Dartmouth in the USA.

Half of India’s estimated population of 1.2 billion is now under twenty-five and, with the middle class growing at an ever increasing rate, competition for places in India is daunting, hence the growing numbers of Indian students applying to US and UK universities. According to the article in the NYT, some students accepted by Delhi University had to achieve ‘the almost impossible’ cut-off scores of 100%. Moreover, the Indian Institutes of Technology are now having to turn down 98% of applicants.

Indian students now represent the second largest grouping of students in the USA, with ‘almost 105,000 students in the 2009-2010 academic year’, coming only after the number of Chinese students.

This news is both good and bad: on the one hand, countries like the USA and the UK will benefit hugely (for the time being) from the income earned from these students; on the other, when these students return home, they will be the ones generating the new business start-ups, and filling the top slots in established companies and the universities, against which the West will have to compete.

What was it again that DigbyJones said back in 2006? Something along the lines that, unless we pull up our socks, 'India will have our lunch and China will have our dinner!'
Thanks to Kitchen Table Math for the heads-up on the NYT story.

Teach the teachers first!

2011-12-03T12:59:00.000Z

It’s perhaps a little early in the day to be saying this but the signs are that the government has made a huge blunder in putting together resources and training for match funding. Already, it is becoming obvious to us that many schools are using the opportunity to replenish their libraries (a massive allocation of money (£3000). While, under other circumstances, I wouldn’t disagree – as can be seen from this blog’s support for Alan Gibbons’s ‘Campaign for the Book’ – in this case I shake my head in disbelief.
Why? Well, by and large the primary purpose of phonics books/decodable readers is to give pupils practice in what they have learnt more formally in class. Admittedly, the quality of some decodable readers will be of such a high standard that some pupils will ‘crack the code’ for themselves, so obvious is it that letters are symbols for sounds in the language.

That said, I would contend that for most pupils this kind of reader is a support to systematic and explicit phonics instruction. Such instruction can only be given by properly trained teaching practitioners. Right up to this moment, there are, as we have ascertained from the many NQT trainees who have already attended our courses, very few training institutions giving anything more than the most rudimentary training in phonics teaching – usually little more than half a day.
As for practising teachers, it seems that if they got any ‘training’ at all, it was a morning’s gallop through Letters and Sounds – the training amounting to little more than a familiarisation with the folder.There are some who argue that L&S is everything teachers need to remedy the problem of illiteracy in this country. They are wrong! To begin with, as has been demonstrated by past practice all too clearly, putting the latest government training initiative into document form and lobbing it into the schools, where more often than not it gathers dust, is not training. Secondly, L&S does not make explicit the purpose for which the writing system was invented – to represent the sounds of the language. Thirdly, it doesn’t teach the necessary skills needed to develop fluency in reading and spelling with anything like the rigour required. Fourthly, it goes far too fast for the fifty percent tail. Fifthly, it doesn’t train teaching practitioners in what to do when pupils make errors.
Many school staff we talk to are still unaware that there is such a thing as matched funding; others believe it is only available for buying resources. This isn’t surprising if you look at the catalogue that has been sent out to schools.
If schools are spending their allocation on resources alone, we will be in the same place when the government funding dries up.
Train the teachers!

Praise for Sounds-Write from former Teacher of the Year

2011-12-01T22:51:00.000Z

Alison Hatch, Deputy Headteacher at Reculver CE Primary School in Kent was recently trained in Sounds-Write on one of our Kent trainings by Derrie Clark. She described it as a ‘light bulb moment’ in her career and in her understanding of how reading and spelling should be taught.
Alison won the National Primary Teacher of the Year 2000 and now does judging for the teaching awards. She says: "Once I get a headship ... I will champion Sounds-Write and get you to train up all the staff if they have not had it. Thank you so much!!"

'Silent letters'?

2011-11-26T16:46:00.000Z

Something which keeps on coming up on Sounds-Write trainings we run is the question of ‘silent letters’. The explanation that there are such things as ‘silent letters’ is still one to which many teachers resort when they find themselves unable to explain the relationship between sounds and print. For example, in the word ‘knight’, although they will refer to the igh spelling as representing the sound ‘ie’, many talk about the k as being ‘silent’.

Apart from being logically inconsistent, the tendency betrays a lack of understanding of how the writing system works. Having recognised igh as representing the sound ‘ie’, it is but a short step to recognising the two-letter spelling kn as a spelling alternative for the sound ‘n’.

In English there are multiple spellings: ‘fun’, ‘winning’, ‘know’, ‘gnome’, ‘pneumatic’, and ‘gone’, are all examples of spellings of the sound 'n'. What is true for the sound ‘n’ applies equally to the other sounds in the English language and this makes learning to read and spell in English harder.

Why is the use of the term ‘silent letters’ potentially damaging to children’s understanding of how the English alphabet code works and to their ability to learn what is a complex system? For a start, young children are often very literal and when people talk about letters ‘making’ or ‘saying’ sounds, they take this literally. They think that letters do actually make sounds. In such a complex system as English when letters singly or in combination can represent multiple sounds - for example, the combination ea can be /ee/ in ‘meat’, /e/ in ‘head’ and /ae/ in ‘break’ – unless children are taught systematically and explicitly, the system can give the appearance of being completely random and chaotic. This makes the task of learning it appear impossible and, for some children, ‘magical’, for if letters ‘make’ sounds, then they can make any sound and there is no logic to the writing system. Letters do NOT make sounds. People make sounds and spellings (letters, singly or in combination) represent them.

Symbolic systems are fundamental to highly developed societies. We use them in music, mathematics, literature and, most importantly, in writing. In the writing system, spellings represent sounds in the language. The English writing system is complex but it is rendered consistent and coherent if learners are taught from the beginning how it works from a conceptual point of view. If learners, and this includes young children, are taught that the sounds in their speech, of which there are a limited and finite number, are represented by the squiggles on the page we call letters (I prefer the more accurate and specific ‘spellings’), we have a system that is ordered and can easily be taught from simple to complex. In teaching from sound to print, we avoid the contortions purveyors of the print-to-sound trajectory have to go through to explain the code, which result in illogical ideas such as 'silent letters'. To paraphrase Diane McGuinness: speech sounds are the basis for the code, the spellings are the code.

In a system in which all letters in a written word are orthographic symbols in their own right, there isn’t anything left out that can be designated a ‘silent letter’.

Visual rhetorical reverberations, or linguistics tattoos to you and me

2011-11-15T09:25:00.001Z

Ever considered a linguistics tattoo? Probably not! But Team Verb showed how me how amazingly committed some people are to their academic disciplines and the legs (you have to look at the slide show slide 10! ) to which they will go to display that commitment.

Running teachers’ courses I’ve seen some interesting tattoos in my time. After reading this, I shall be looking out in future for a little schwa, replacing that butterfly/bizarre Chinese aphorism on someone’s pinkie, shoulder or ankle!

b ʊ t w aɪ w ʊ d ɛ n iːw ɒ n w ɒ n t

t uː t æ t uː ə ɡ l ɒ t l s t ɒ p (ʔ )

ɒ n t uː ð ɛər h æ n d ð oʊ?

Red faces at UKLA as Scarlett reads and spells non-words

2011-11-11T16:33:00.000Z

Literacy 'experts' maintain that testing children on made-up words confuses children and that they can’t read or spell words that aren't real. As I’ve argued repeatedly, see here and here, they are talking utter claptrap.

Well, I thought, I’m sure my friend’s daughter Scarlett would love to show them just how wrong they are: http://vimeo.com/31894110. And she did!
Thanks to Scarlett. No adults were harmed in the making of the video.

The parent factor in student performance (OECD)

2011-11-09T16:27:00.000Z

It sounds like a headline from the Daily Stands-back-in-amazement: the BBC education news desk reported yesterday that an OECD study has discovered there is ‘a strong link between teenage reading skills and early parental help’. Hmmm, you're very likely calling to mind John Cleese's 'stating the bleeding obvious' remark!

Graeme Paton in the Telegraph has also picked up the story today, which he’s chosen to headline as ‘Reading with parents “improves children's exams results”'. I imagine it gets parents’ attention more effectively that the OECD's rather more muted ‘Reading to children has long-term impact’!

OECD studies are well conducted and are therefore worth considering. In this case, the research indicates that, even when social differences are taken into consideration, children who are supported by their parents in the early years, ‘were six months ahead in reading levels at the age of fifteen’.

The study also highlights the importance of talk at home. Interestingly, the report also suggests that parents don’t have to be well educated to be able to make a difference. Simply reading to children several times a week seems to make a difference. This chimes well with research done in the USA by Betty Hart and Todd Risley, (see here) which showed that the amount of talk given by a care-giver to their child, crucially in the first three years, correlated very highly with the child’s future academic success. And, it wasn’t the quality of the talk that was so important; it was the sheer quantity that made the difference.

However, certain other important questions remain. What constitutes parental support? Does this mean that parents merely read to their children? Does it mean that parents read with their children – the children reading what they can and the parents helping out when the children reached the limits of their abilities? Does it mean that parents actively taught their children to decode and then went on to engage their children in reading books which were commensurate with what they had taught, in terms of skills, concepts and knowledge about the code? How about the differences in ease with which some languages are encoded and decoded? All of these are pertinent questions and often obscure what is meant by the term ‘supporting children’s reading’.

Unless we operationalise the terminology we use, it’s not clear what important issues are being (sometimes deliberately!) elided.

Please Miss, what's a Grinch?

2011-11-05T11:56:00.000Z

Why are education journalists such dupes?

Once again, this time in the pages of the Independent and on the BBC website, education journalists have swallowed the nonsense propagated by ‘literacy experts’ who are calling on the government to abandon the planned tests of reading for six-year-olds.

The opposition to the tests is in truth an attack on the government’s determination to tackle the scandalous problem of illiteracy in this country by making sure that children are taught phonics by the age of five. However, the focus of the attack is on the ‘pseudo words’ or the words that are not really words in the English language (yet anyway!) which comprise one part of the reading test.

The ‘experts’ siren song so far has been to try attract the gullible with claims that because the words aren’t real words, they will confuse children. They see this as the Achilles heel of the government proposal. The Sounds-Write programme has used nonsense words for the past eight years, and, out of eight thousand teaching practitioners trained, not once have we had a single complaint about children becoming confused. If presented as a sort of game and children are told that the words they are going to read are not real words but are made-up or nonsense words, they have no difficulty whatsoever. In fact, they regard it as fun. Not only that, they are amazed and excited by the fact that they can read and spell words they have never seen before.

Non-words aside, what are we trying to achieve by teaching children phonics? We are teaching children how the sounds of their language relate to the spelling system and, in so doing, equipping them to be able to read anything, regardless of whether they recognise the meaning of the word immediately or not.

Much new vocabulary is learnt in context. When an unfamiliar word is decoded (read), the reader uses their contextual knowledge to discern meaning, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Regardless, they need to be able to decode it before meaning can be established.

The arguments put forward by people who obviously have never taught phonics to young children and quite obviously don’t know what they are talking about are specious. Frankly, journalists ought to be making more of an effort to present the other side of the argument by going in to schools and finding out for themselves the merits or demerits of the case in question. If any are listening, I can provide plenty of evidence to demonstrate.

TES reloaded?

2011-10-29T12:00:00.000+01:00

Since its revamp, have you noticed how the TES seems also to be shifting its political alignment? A few weeks ago, it ran a much more sympathetic piece on Chris Woodhead, former chief inspector of schools, than I’d have expected – notwithstanding the fact that Chris has motor-neurone disease.

This week, there’s an editorial entitled ‘The Red Flag has turned Burgundy. Unions must too’. It is peppered with disapproval of the unions’ positions on a range of matters. Listen to this: ‘The biggest threat to the unions’ future, however, lies in their utter failure to be credible professionals. They talk excellence but tolerate mediocrity … They back school improvement but not at the expense of their branch network,’ and so on. Pretty strong stuff!

But the real sting in the tail comes towards the end, where it accuses union leaders of consigning the everyday detail of the job of teaching to the status of an afterthought. Their minds are set on higher things, such as the denunciation of the government, ‘so despicable it makes Herod look like Mary Poppins’. This, thunders Gerard Kelly, ‘is the language of ideological purists’; and he goes on to ask how unions are ‘supposed to appeal to the professional whose daily battles are a lot less epic, who loves teaching, who probably voted for the Tories, who packed in a good job to work in a school and who couldn’t give two hoots if it was called an academy’.

Whatever next? They might even begin to switch away from their slavish allegiance to the whole language lobby and towards the kind of balanced literacy teaching advocated by Sounds-Write.

Down with high-frequency words!

2011-10-28T13:23:00.000+01:00

Recently, I’ve been posting on a thread on the RRF forum. The subject turned to questions about high-frequency words and, if you’re interested, you can follow what was being argued (here).

However, my main point was that there are thousands of teaching practitioners across the country who haven’t a clue how the writing system works in relation to the sounds of the language and, what’s more, have no idea how to teach it. The corollary of this is that many of them then resort to teaching the 100, 200 or 300 high-frequency words laid down in Letters and Sounds as 'sight' words. In other words, they present the words as words that have to be 'remembered'.

Here’s one example of what’s going on: today, my neighbour’s daughter, now in Y1, showed me the spelling list she had brought home to learn. It contains 198 high-frequency words. The only order in which they have been presented is alphabetical (!), which immediately undermines the logic of the code and serves only to confuse children. In YR the child was taught ‘some’ phonics of the one sound/one letter kind (but without any rigorous teaching of the necessary skills of blending, segmenting or manipulating sounds in words), plus the usual diet of ORT books. Now, in Y1, she’s being asked to supplement this with a list of HFWs to be learnt. The default mechanism by which the child is expected to ‘learn’ them is by sight.

My question is: in what way does this approach represent any sort of progress on what was being taught ten or fifteen years ago? The question is of course rhetorical because in my opinion it isn’t any sort of progress.

So, after sticking L&S (or other early years resources) into the hands of teachers, such as the KS1 team in the particular Buckingham school attended by my neighbour’s daughter, and not training them in how to teach it, those responsible for these things would find – if they only looked – that many teachers are doing what they always did. In fact, if you have a look at page 2 of the thread on the RRF, Susan Godsland has posted links to other forums on which there are examples of three teaching practitioners, all of whom are struggling in one way or another with the task of how to teach their pupils to read. All three ask for help in finding ‘resources’ and/or ‘ideas’.

The message we at Sounds-Write have been shouting from the rooftops is that it’s the training. No amount of resources or ‘ideas’ will on their own enable teachers to teach the pupils in question how to read and spell. Teachers need to be trained! Which is also why is was a massive blunder by the government to offer up to £3000 for resources and/or training in their match-funding initiative. When the argument has not been made for training, many schools spend money on resources without the teachers being trained in how to use them.

That list!

Reading with kids

2011-10-22T16:03:00.000+01:00

The Guardian: Reading with kids

Today’s Guardian is selling itself on its twenty-four page pull-out ‘Reading with kids’. If you’re looking for good books to buy your young relatives, it offers plenty of advice: ‘The book doctor’ pages for 0-4s and 5-7s contain lots of occasions for what Francis Spufford in his The Child that Books Built once referred to as ‘excited delight’. Where’s My Teddy, Mog the Forgetful Cat, Owl Babies, The Tiger Skin Rug, and many more remarkable stories proffer opportunities for many happy hours of reading, listening, talking and simply enjoying your children’s company.

Children’s laureate Julia Donaldson discusses the power of books to help children understand their own emotions and feelings. This particular aspect of reading is endorsed by Spufford when he describes the book as becoming ‘part of our self-understanding’ and as freeing us ‘from the limitations of having just one limited life with one point of view’. Sensibly, in my opinion, Donaldson decries the practice of reading to children solely for instrumental purposes.

Towards the end of the supplement, there‘s a double-page spread on authors in performance. In more recent years, enticing a well-known author into schools has become very popular. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of listening to Michael Morpurgo and watching him hold the attention of dozens of children as he told one of his stories. The Guardian’s piece focuses on John Hegley and Anthony Browne as performers as well as writers. For my part, Anthony Browne is superb at combining image and text in playful and ironic ways which are appealing to children and adults alike.

Sadly, for parents hoping for some sensible advice on how to teach their children to read, this pull-out isn’t of any help at all. In fact, the most insubstantial of the pieces included is the first by Tim Dowling. Dowling believes reading to be ‘a solitary pursuit’ and, rather incongruously for this selection, confesses to having read to his children in a ‘bored monotone’ and to having skipped several pages at a time, sometimes rendering ‘the plot incomprehensible’. What a way to encourage one’s readership!

After admitting that he believes reading to one’s children is ‘oversold’ and that ‘he did what he had to do’, he claims that his three children learned to read at school on, you’ve guessed it, the Oxford Reading Tree series. Phonics is dismissed in a parodic sentence and he asserts breezily that, in learning to read, the children ‘found it easier still to commit whole chunks of text to memory’. Dowling is yet another example of people who seem to think that because they have a level of expertise in one area (in his case music journalism); they're experts on how we teach children to read.

Apart from recommending the Open University course 'Children’s literature', my own favourite children’s books, in no particular order of preference, are: Oliver Jeffries’ Incredible Shrinking Boy, Colin Thompson’s How to Live Forever, Anthony Browne’s Voices in the Park, Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, and Maurice Sendak’s superb Where the Wild Things Are.

Crystal's ology

2011-10-18T18:02:00.000+01:00

If you live in England and teach literacy, you’ll have heard of 100 high-frequency words! You may also remember Neil MacGregor’s recent and marvellous 'History of the World in 100 Objects' series. Well, now David Crystal has turned his attention once more to the subject of language and produced the Story of English in 100 Words.

The words he has chosen are meant to ‘tell a story’, be redolent of their time and the culture they represented. The first is the oldest known word carved in the runic script, known as the futhorc, after the first six letters of its alphabet, on a roe-deer’s ankle bone and found in a cemetery site in Norfolk. The word appears to be, raïhan or roe-deer.

From thence, the list, which as you might expect is chronological, includes words from Anglo-Saxon, though probably not as many as you’d think, Early English, Middle English, right through to Modern English.

They embrace not only the words we write but colloquial words like ‘doobry’ and ‘dilly-dally’. Then there are dialect words, such as ‘brock’. [My own favourite is the north Staffordshire word ‘sneeped’], grammatical words, and ‘rude’ words, of which there are three, introduced ‘blushingly’ by their initials alone!

As the English language is a veritable ‘vacuum cleaner, eagerly sucking in words from other languages whenever English speakers find it useful to do so’, you’ll also find ‘dinkum’ and ‘schmooze’. Of course, no such list would be complete without a word from Harry Potter – ‘muggle’ –, or one spawned from the new technologies – ‘Twittersphere’ – which is where he leaves us, for now!

Why the pen is mightier than the keyboard

2011-10-15T20:40:00.002+01:00

There’s a very interesting article in the TES by Adi Bloom this week (14th October 2011) about handwriting. In it Mr Beswick from Greave Primary school in Stockport is quoted as arguing strongly that handwriting is redundant and that keyboard skills are the future. On the other hand, Mr Gibbons of Nettlesham Junior school in Lincolnshire and his Y3 teacher Rachel Moreton believe that handwriting is hugely important in building ‘muscle memory’, that writing words helps pupils remember how to spell them.

Who is right? Well, not Mr Beswick, if the research evidence is to be credited! His argument that ‘you need to think about what’s going to happen when children meet the big, wide world’ in ’10 to 15 years time’ makes little sense to me. In 10 to 15 years time, Mr Beswick, computers will probably have been superseded by new technologies.

Leaving aside aesthetic considerations, as Mr Gibbons and Ms Moreton intuit, the practice of handwriting in school fulfils a much more important and fundamental function than merely presenting an elegant hand to aged aunts in thanks for birthday presents.

There is a significant body of research that demonstrates that copying letters is by far away the most efficient way of learning them. In 'How handwriting boosts the brain', Gwendolyn Bounds looks at the work of Karin James, of Indiana University, whose work shows how important handwriting is in learning to read. Learning is even faster and effective if pupils say sounds as they are writing the sound/spelling correspondences.

Writing in this way is a multi-sensory activity. Firstly, the teacher needs to model the shapes of letters and, if necessary, to show orientation of the letters – where to start, which way to go and where to finish. To copy, children’s eyes need to look at the letters and to follow the shapes with their eyes and they need to form the letters with a pencil, whiteboard marker pen, or paintbrush. Or, they can simply write in the air, write in sand, and use finger paint, and so on. While letters are being copied, pupils need to be saying the sounds they represent. They will also say the whole word as they complete it.

As they are saying the sounds and writing the sound/spelling correspondences, they are hearing them at the same time. So, they are simultaneously looking, touching, speaking and listening. Psychologists are firmly convinced of the value of multi-sensory approaches: the more senses one uses, they believe, the more likely it is that the brain will remember whatever it is working with.

On Sounds-Write trainings, teaching practitioners are encouraged to get pupils practising writing from the start of the programme. As long as the writing they do is commensurate with where they are in the programme, they get lots of opportunity to write words and simple sentences, which has the added effect that pupils also realise that the code is reversible: what they see is what they hear, what they hear is what they see.
See my other blog postings on the subject of handwriting here and here.

The Wrong Stuff!

2011-10-10T10:43:00.003+01:00

I’ve just been watching Michael Rosen on Matthew Wright’s show 'The Wright Stuff', broadcast on October 6^th. After talking about the plight of the independent booksellers, he was asked by one of the guests on the show what he thought about the government’s support for phonics.

What followed had me howling with laughter. For a chap who knows what kinds of literature children find exciting and funny and whose books and poetry, not to mention the Radio 4 programme ‘Word of Mouth’, are so good, when it comes to talking about how to teach children to read, he is appallingly ignorant.

On ‘The Wright Stuff’, Michael began by saying that phonics is ‘sounding out’, a travesty of a description if ever there was one. Phonics is a proven and effective means of teaching all learners an explicit awareness of the sounds in English and how these sounds map to the spelling or writing system, the write stuff, if you like! The disparaging 'sounding out' is of course calculated to trivialise what is in reality a skilled pedagogical approach.

He gave the example of the word ‘bed’, which he said would be dealt with in phonic terms as ‘buh’ ‘buh’ ‘buh’ ‘e’ ‘e’ ‘duh’ ‘duh’. [It might seem a small point but even the way he says the sounds is part of the rhetoric he employs to caricature what phonics teaching actually is.] The ’b' 'b' ‘b’ would be put together with the ‘ed’, which he described as being one sound (!), after which one would read the word ‘bed’. This is, it is true, one particular (and rather discredited) phonic approach. It is commonly known as ‘onset and rime’, an approach Diane McGuinness reports as correlating very poorly to learning to read and spell and which has now been largely abandoned.

Rosen claimed that children wouldn’t be able to decode the word ‘would’. He says that when, for example, they try to read the word ‘would’ by saying the sounds , ‘wuh’, ‘oe’, ‘l’, ‘d’ , they’d get something like ‘wold’. And, of course, he is playing around with this nonsense to a studio audience who have terrific respect for him as a children’s author but don’t realise that, when it comes to knowing anything about good quality phonics teaching, he clearly hasn’t a clue.

Any well-trained phonics teacher would teach words like ‘would’, ‘could’ and ‘should’ with words like ‘bush’, and ‘cook’ (as said in most southern accents of English), where the sound ‘oo’ as in w’oo’d is taught as being represented by the three spelling alternatives oo, oul and u.

Michael goes on to give further examples, such as ‘was’, which he describes as a ‘tricky word’ and suggests that a phonic strategy would lead a child to say ‘w’ ‘a’ ‘s’, instead of ‘woz’, which is how it sounds.

I don’t know where Michael has got his information but this is poppycock! Words like ‘was’ are perfectly decodable. What’s more, such examples form part of very common patterns in the language: after the sound ‘w’, we often spell the sound ‘o’ with the letter a. Think about it! There’s ‘want’, ‘swap’, ‘what’, ‘wallow’, wasp, etc., etc.

So, he concludes, a single strategy doesn’t work. There is, he states, another one, which he says phonics people secretly admit to using: Look and Say. [Actually, Michael, here’s one who doesn’t!] Because, he says, twenty-five per cent of words are ‘tricky words’, which in Rosen-speak means ‘un-decodable’, children need a Look and Say strategy. Of course the truth is that all words in English are decodable. All words are comprised of sounds and all sounds can be represented by spellings even if some of those spellings are less frequent than others. What Michael doesn’t seem to understand is that the writing system was invented to represent the sounds in the language. So, when he says that the two letters ‘e’ and ‘d’ (actually Michael, they are sounds not letters) make the ‘ed’ sound, he's just plain wrong. Letters do NOT make sounds. They represent sounds made by people and there are a finite number of sounds in the English language. However, because the relationship between sounds and spellings is not transparent as it is in many other languages, English is harder to teach and takes more time.

Telling people that the spelling system in English is complex and that it takes time and patience and that teachers need proper training in how it should be done isn’t as entertaining as sitting in front of a television audience ridiculing phonics with cute and erroneous jokes.

Phonics advocates are just as passionate about children enjoying books and having access to books as people like Michael Rosen. The marvellous thing about phonics advocates is that they are the ones with a truly balanced approach: they encourage children to read and they also teach children to read.

My thanks to Susan Godsland for drawing my attention to the programme.

Teaching languages by five

2011-10-02T13:54:00.000+01:00

Having at one time worked for the British Council and the (as it was then) Bell Educational Trust, I know from first-hand experience that it is entirely possible to teach young children to speak, read and write foreign languages.

Michael Gove’s suggestion that language teaching should start at five is by no means radical. In countries, such as Luxembourg for example, where several languages are spoken, children grow up acquiring or being taught as many as four different languages. In other countries, teaching foreign languages from an early age is taken for granted. For example, when I visited a school in Vallecas in Madrid in 2002, children as young as five were already spending part of their day learning English through a variety of different activities.

In Italy, the children I saw who had started learning English at five with the British Council had already by the age of eleven and twelve attained a high degree of proficiency. This means that they were able not only to cope with the more formal aspects of speaking, reading and writing in English but also they were able to use it when pursuing their particular pastimes – watching films, playing computer games, listening to music, etc.

The idea of teaching ‘English through ...’ is not a new one. It is based on the simple idea that learning a subject of interest through the medium of a foreign language presents a much more powerful purpose than learning the language out of context. At the Bell in the eighties we were already teaching youngsters from all parts of the world English through science, art, and sport.

While I’d be more cautious about making claims that learning languages improves an individuals’s brain power, as Gove is quoted as saying, he is almost certainly right in saying that, ‘learning a foreign language, and the culture that goes with it, is one of the most useful things we can do to broaden the empathy and imaginative sympathy and cultural outlook of children’.

As Suzanne Romaine, in her book Bilingualism, put it: ‘What distinguishes bilinguals from monolinguals is that bilinguals usually have greater resources...’.

Paton - tly obvious!

2011-09-30T12:25:00.000+01:00

You’ve got to give credit to Graeme Paton. He is nothing if not dogged. When it comes to trying to get something done about the numbers of children being unable to read and write, persistence is a key attribute.

Yesterday, he revealed that around ‘15 per cent of children in England have reading skills no better than a five-year-old’. This in spite of the billions the last government spent on the Literacy Strategy!

What is equally alarming is that a third of boys from poorer families can’t read properly. The figures are even worse for writing: according to Paton, only 59 per cent of boys from poorer backgrounds ‘can write properly’.

The trouble is that many head teachers seem still to be blissfully unaware that being able to read and write proficiently underpins everything else. That or they pay lip service to the importance of teaching reading and spelling and the time it takes to do it properly.

On Sounds-Write trainings, we constantly come up against the complaint that ‘in our school we aren’t allowed to spend more than ten or fifteen minutes two or three times a week’ on teaching children to become literate. And yet, everything flows from that ability. If a pupil can read and write, they are much more able to develop whatever potential they have.

Because of the complexity of the English alphabet code - something else many heads don’t understand - phonics lessons need to be taught for half an hour a day every day. If that is done and done properly, pupils emerge from Key Stage 1 fully capable of contending with the greater textual demands placed on them in Key Stage 2.

Why are advocates of phonics so defensive?

2011-09-17T13:24:00.001+01:00

In an interview for a BBC news item about phonics with Reeta Chakrabarti, Christine Richmond, from Cannon Lane First School, said that, ‘anything that comes into schools that is going to allow children who are not achieving to be picked up by schools has got to be a good thing.’

Now, it’s not that I object to Ms Richmond saying that it’s of paramount importance to identify children who aren’t achieving. I don’t! It’s tremendously important. But, what about very able children? Phonics is hugely important for them too.

St Thomas Aquinas school in Bletchley is a primary school where Sounds-Write has been used for a number of years. In 2006, we tested fifty children in Y2 [average age seven years and three months] who had been taught using Sounds-Write from the beginning of YR. On the spelling test we used (Dennis Young’s Parallel Spelling Tests, 2nd edition, which has a ceiling of eleven years), 44% (22 out of 50) of pupils hit the ceiling on the test, 64% (32 out of 50) of all pupils had a spelling age above nine years and six months, and 90% (45 out of 50) had a spelling age of eight years or above. Only one pupil had a spelling age below their chronological age.

So, not only were the least able pupils performing very much better than anyone had ever expected, but the most able were able to read almost anything that was thrown at them. At the end of Key Stage 1, in terms of being able to read and spell, they were already equipped to cope with the demands of a secondary curriculum. What’s more, they enjoyed reading because reading was something that was very easy to do. In other words, they had acquired the kind of automaticity that allows immediate access to the content of what is being read.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that these pupils would have been able to understand every word they were able to read. Given a text to read from, say, the New Scientist, they might well struggle to comprehend meaning. Understanding comes with cultural capital but much cultural capital is acquired through reading. As Keith Stanovich* has pointed out, ‘print is a uniquely rich source of content. Personal experience provides only narrow knowledge of the world and is often misleading and unrepresentative’.

What’s the message? Exactly the opposite of what the whole language zealots in the UK Literacy Association and the NAS/UWT are saying! To develop a love of reading, you need to be able to decode print and this is a skill that needs to be taught by trained teachers who know how the writing system works and how to teach it. That isn’t to say that we neglect other things. Teaching children how to read and spell should take place in the kind of rich, literary environment that lovers of reading so rightly advocate.

*Stanovich, K., (2000), 'Does Reading Make you Smarter', in Progress in Understanding Reading, London, The Guilford Press.

They used to hunt animals

2011-09-16T17:21:00.001+01:00

Yesterday’s Radio 4 programme carried a fascinating little piece on the work of Dr Paul Tench, a retired linguist from Cardiff University. Paul has been helping the Shanjo people of Zambia to develop a writing system for the first time.

The twenty thousand or so Shanjo people are but one group in a country of 13.5 million people in which some seventy-three languages are spoken.

Until Paul’s work, the Shanjo had to be content to use siLozi, the official language of Zambia’s Western Province, or English. SiLozi is the L1 (first language) of around 600,000 Lozi people and thousands of others as an L2 (second language).

Why then did the Shanjo people want a written language of their own? This was a question Paul Tench understood very well. having worked in a linguistics department at a Welsh university, he knows only too well what it feels like for people to speak a minority language when there is a very powerful dominant one available.

As the Shanjo people had long wanted to ensure the survival of their culture in all its aspects, working with five farmers, only one of whom had received a secondary education, Paul set about creating an alphabet to represent the sounds of ciShanjo (the Shanjo’s language). So far, the project has been tested on a young Shanjo woman, who was able to read ‘everything without much difficulty’.

Already there is a dictionary and a Bible in the making. Eventually, the project should enable the Shanjo people to record their stories, their poetry, and forms of entertainment, as well as enhancing the group’s standing and sense of dignity in the region.

Even more importantly, the significance of the move for children cannot be understated. As Gareth Evans writes in his piece ‘Taking pride in learning how to write a language for the first time’ in the Western Mail:

"Primary education in the mother tongue is a 'commodity' that Wales can be proud of, and can export. The mother tongue in early education enhances cognitive development because it is the language of a child's thinking, understanding, knowing and learning. It has a psychological advantage in that it is the language that children are at ease in; there is no extra, special effort in attention as there is when a less familiar language is used."

And, Shanjo? Apparently, it means 'they used to hunt animals'.

Freshmen common reads

2011-09-10T08:37:00.000+01:00

National Public Radio (npr) in the USA are currently running a piece on recommended ‘Freshmen common reads’. These are books many colleges and universities ask their new intake of students to read over the summer and be prepared to talk about in the first week of the first semester on campus.

Npr have been asking their listeners and readers to contribute their choices, which include Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, as well as Natalie Angier’s The Canon: A Whirligig Tour Of The Beautiful Basics Of Science. Oddly enough, Angier’s book is one of the books I’m currently reading and it’s a cracker. It’s a pity that more head teachers and literacy co-ordinators don’t pick it up and read the chapter on ‘Thinking Scientifically’!

Anyway, you’ll find more where those came from on the npr website. And, if you would like to listen to Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at UCLA, talking about his book and responding to questions from listeners you can catch it on npr’s podcast.

Cognitive connections in the early years!

2011-09-09T09:47:00.000+01:00

Talking of cognitive connections, my friend Ginny has just directed me to this!

Looks as if some of the kids are not making the kind of cognitive connections we'd want!

Crystal clear

2011-09-08T10:23:00.002+01:00

David Crystal has posted a couple of noteworthy pieces on his blog just lately. One is ‘On linguistic apps’, in which he points readers in the direction of a grammar app from the Survey of English Usage at University College London. According to David, ‘it's called iGE, the interactive Grammar of English, and it's available for iPhone 3 and 4, iPod Touch, and the iPad’.
I hope he right when he suggests that it won’t be long before we see the emergence of lots more linguistic apps, ‘especially’, as he says, ‘in areas of language which are difficult to handle in traditional ways, such as phonetics and phonology’. Mmm. I do hope so. Then perhaps the DfE will provide one for the scrutinisers of the self-evaluations submitted to them by phonics providers.
And, if, as I’m sure you’ve always wondered, you want to know the difference between ‘On being persuaded and convince’, there’s the usual elegant and descriptive explanation.

Language and LEGO? Where's the connection?

2011-09-08T09:26:00.001+01:00

I have to admit that it’s a bit nerdy of me to return from holiday – not really! I was doing an intensive course in Spanish – and direct readers to Diacritics, a blog I discovered through Mr Verb.

The latest posting by John Stokes asks the question: ‘Why are humans smart? Language and LEGOs’. The piece is based on work by Elizabeth Spelke, who argues, not unreasonably, that what distinguishes humans from animals is language.

What is particularly fascinating about the line of argument, which, I add, is as yet unproven, is the link between our ability to connect different aspects of core knowledge and the development of language in humans in endlessly interesting ways.

LEGO comes into it by way of analogy. Try to combine bumpless LEGO blocks into more and more complex structures and they soon collapse. Add the bumps and corresponding dips and almost infinite complexity becomes possible. So, Spelke argues, it is with language: ‘language capacity… allows the most basic building blocks of cognitive ability to communicate and interact’.

When did all of this happen? Apparently, in evolutionary terms, relatively recently – a mere thirty thousand years ago! But, it happened very fast and here the analogy turns towards computer technology. Drawing on the work of Chomsky et al, John suggests that all it might have taken for humans to make that great evolutionary leap was the critical ‘upgrade’ of a ‘cognitive connector’ that enabled the core knowledge systems to combine – one small step… one giant leap … and all that.

All rather speculative but no less interesting for that - much like the kind of short article one might find in the New Scientist! The posting and the website are well worth a visit.

R&R time

2011-07-29T18:40:00.000+01:00

Time for some R&R

Murphy's law corrected

2011-07-24T12:23:00.000+01:00

I would like to apologise to Dianne Murphy in jumping the gun by suggesting that her approach to the teaching of reading was Whole Language.

Dianne has written a comment on the tail of the posting to say that the approach is “definitely not 'Whole Language' and nor is it 'drill and practise' in the sense of mindless repetition”.

Guess what I’m having for Sunday lunch? Another slice of that humble pie, please!

Biff and Chips to go? Oh no!

2011-07-24T11:48:00.001+01:00

There’s been a lot of adverse criticism recently of the Oxford Reading Tree series, featuring Biff, Chip et al, and teachers often ask me on Sounds-Write courses if they shouldn’t just throw them all out because they do not conform to what most people recognise as decodable readers.

The answer, of course, is absolutely not!

Here’s why. It’s certainly true that the series isn’t easily decodable for beginning readers. Here are the first two pages of The Go-Kart, a Stage 2 reader, which I have coded according to sound-spelling correspondences:

D a d m a d e a g o-k ar t.

B i ff w a n t e d th e g o-k ar t.

Anyone who teaches synthetic or linguistic phonics knows immediately the difficulties a beginning reader would have in trying to read a text like this. There are two schwas, one split spelling, the spelling of the sound ‘o’ after the sound ‘w’, five two-letter spellings, and more. In fact, the degree of complexity is so great that many beginning readers get the idea that the words need to be memorised as whole words because the words are too difficult to read, which is why, for some teachers, these books have lost their appeal..

However, after the Initial Code – i.e. all the one-to-ones in CVC, CVCC, CCVC, and CCVCC words, (etc), plus the double consonants and ‘sh’, ‘ch’, (etc). – has been covered and once pupils have been taught four or five ways of spelling the sounds ‘ae’, ‘ee’, ‘oe’, ‘er’, ‘e’, ‘ow’, ‘oo’ and ‘ie’, ORT books are fantastic for building fluency and confidence. In fact, with a little help from a knowledgeable teacher, The Go-Kart is easily accessible to a beginning reader who knows the one-to-ones and understands that sounds can be represented by two-letters spellings. In addition, common sound-spelling correspondences, such as the ar spelling for the sound ‘ar’ can build code knowledge along the way.

In addition, our course attendees are almost always united in their enthusiasm for the characters, the story lines with their simple plot structures, the illustrations and their familiarity. They can also be fun to read to children.

Take ‘Charlie’ for example. Charlie came to me as a complete non-reader at the end of YR. What had happened is that he had been taught Whole Language and he simply didn’t 'get it'. After just three months work on the Initial Code, well supported with lots of reading decodable materials – Sounds-Write readers and Dandelion Readers – we went straight on to Oxford Reading Tree books, again supported by decodable readers to focus on the issues of adjacent consonants and on the ways in which particular sounds are spelled.

Despite the drawbacks, as long as teaching practitioners have a clearly established purpose in mind for using the ORT series, they should be a very useful adjunct to our teaching. All of which is why Biff doesn’t make me want to chip*.

*London slang for ‘leave’, ‘depart’.

Murphy's law re-stated

2011-07-23T13:23:00.000+01:00

What was Christopher Middleton at the Telegraph thinking when he called what Dianne Murphy is doing a ‘literacy revolution’? He evidently has never read Marx’s 18^th Brumaire of Louise Napoleon, which, prompted Marx to remark famously that history repeats itself, ‘first as tragedy, then as farce’. Far from being a revolution, this kind of methodology - flash card/sight word drill - is both tragic and farcical. And, far from being revolutionary, it is, in literacy terms, profoundly reactionary.

The principal reason for the failure of many of these kids at secondary school to learn to read and spell properly is precisely because the approach used to teach them throughout their primary years was whole language. So, what do they do when these children arrive at secondary school unable to cope with the demands of the curriculum? Throw more of the same at them!

‘Whole language,’ as Diane McGuinness has said, ‘is based on faith, promising everything and delivering nothing.’ Of course, if you drill a pupil for half an hour, three times a week, you can expect some progress. But, for how long? Set up some independent testing of word reading a year down the line and then see if the effects wash out. Of course, some children will ‘crack the code’, as some of their peers have already done in primary school. Most won’t!

Teaching children to link hundreds and hundreds of words (paired associate learning) to abstract symbols is something that humans find every difficult to do. And then what about all the thousands upon thousands of words that haven’t been taught.

Unless, pupils are taught explicitly how the writing system works (conceptual understanding), are taught the spellings for all the sounds in the language (factual knowledge) and the skills needed to use the aforesaid conceptual and factual knowledge, they will continue to struggle.

And, Chris, if you don’t understand what you’re writing about, don’t write it!

Why ‘ghoti’ is a red herring

2011-07-15T16:41:00.002+01:00

In my last posting, I wrote that Rod Liddle’s invocation of ‘ghoti’ as a way of spelling ‘fish’ – ostensibly to demonstrate how ‘unphonetic’ (ridiculous term!) English is – was nonsensical.

I also wrote that the notion had been entirely discredited. Well, apparently not! Some of my readers have informed me that they are confronted with it from time to time. I was myself a few years ago. The occasion was a talk I was giving at the University of Canberra, when one of the ‘reading specialists’ tried to slap me round the head with this wet ‘ghoti’.

So, how does it work and why is this alleged example so completely implausible? Well, first, gh is a spelling alternative for the sound ‘f’, but never at the beginning of a word. Then, the letter o can represent the sound ‘i’ in ‘women’, but it’s a one-off or so infrequent as not to be worth considering. Finally the combination of letters ti can represent the sound ‘sh’ but only as part of suffixes, such as ‘station’, or ‘essential’, as well as a few other words, like ‘initial’, for example.

According to Wikipedia, ‘linguists have protested that the placement of the letters in the constructed word [ghoti] are inconsistent with the claimed pronunciation'.

However, this isn’t quite right. To say that we pronounce letters puts the cart before the horse. Letters or spellings represent sounds: there are the sounds of the language and there are the agreed (conventional) spellings for those sounds. Sounds come first and the spellings, otherwise meaningless squiggles on the page, symbolise the sounds. So, while it is perfectly acceptable to spell the sound ‘f’ at the beginning of the word ‘fish’ with the spelling f, or even ph (as in a ‘phishing’ trip, an Internet scam, or ‘Phish’, an American rock band!), the combination gh is not – currently!

The real point is that the English spelling system is actually highly regular and, with good teaching and enough practice, can be learned by just about anyone.

I see that this week’s Speccie carries a letter (‘Phonic boom’) from Tom Burkard, Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies, admonishing Rod Liddle for his anti-phonics article last week.

A Liddle knowledge is a dangerous thing!

2011-07-11T14:08:00.001+01:00

I quite like Rod Liddle’s column every week in the Spectator. He usually makes me laugh. Sometimes out loud!

This week began as no exception. In 'My daughter's end-of-term report confirms that she is being taught by alien reptiles', he got the ball rolling by deprecating the ‘vacuous propaganda' emitted by teacher training institutions before turning attention to his daughter’s end-of-term report, which is, as is often the case today, a cut-and-paste job from a menu on the computer. So, no grumbles there!

It was when he sneakily inserted the snide liddle aside about Mary Seacole, ‘the kindly black lady who helped out during the Crimean War’ – for which read that our Florence has been airbrushed from history by the wave of political correctness so beloved by the multiculturalists Rod so despises – that I began to be a liddle nettled. And, I couldn’t bring myself to swallow his claim that, on the pensions march last week, some of the teachers he talked to didn’t know who Michael Gove is. But then, that’s his technique. Reading him is a bit like being a full back trying to read Stanley Matthews in his prime: you’re so mesmerised for a moment by twitch of the hips, he slips the ball past you before you know what’s happened.

But what really rubbed me up the wrong way was what he had to say about phonics – the moment when the keyboard became disconnected from his brain. He had, he confessed, been reading the Guardian and had come to the conclusion that phonics is a bad idea.

He claims that, at his daughter’s school, ‘no child can spell anything’, which he attributes to the ‘phonic method’ they use. Well, there are phonics methods and phonics methods, but if the school’s particular phonics method is any good, children ought to be able to spell like demons. And most phonics methods knock into a cocked hat the kinds of whole language approaches advocated by the organisations onto whose coat tails our Rod is so pathetically hanging.

As so often happens with people who don’t know how the speech sounds in English relate to the writing system, he brings up the old Shavian jest about ‘ghoti’ being read as ‘fish’. Unfortunately, Rod, the fish joke is now so old and discredited it positively stinks. How I’d like to see it hung around your neck for the rest of the week while a bunch of teachers parade you around Fleet Street.

The piece ends with the risible claim that ‘phonics has achieved its dominance … because it is easier on teachers’. While I’m sure most phonics advocates would hotly dispute the first claim, the second is utter tripe.

So, maybe a liddle of what you fancy doesn’t do you that much good!